4 GB USB stick and FAT16/32

Forum: USB booting
Topic: 4 GB USB stick and FAT16/32
started by: Jagan

Posted by Jagan on June 15 2006,23:17

Hi

I'm going to buy a USB-stick to use with DSL, and I'm wondering if I should choose a 2 or 4 GB-stick.

It seems that DSL uses the FAT16-system, which has a maximum size of 2 GB.

Is it possible to have two FAT16-partitions on a 4 GB USB-stick, and both read/writable by DSL?
If not, will both or one of them be readable by Windows?

Someone wrote that it's possible to use the FAT32-filesystem..
Is this correct?

regards
Magnus

Posted by meo on June 16 2006,06:04

Hello Jagan!

I'm using FAT32 on a sandisk titanium cruzer 2GB with DSL installed embedded style as I'm posting this.

Have fun,
meo

Posted by Jagan on June 16 2006,15:25

Hi meo

How did you fix that? I've read that DSL originally only supports FAT16 (with syslinux as loader). Did you use GRUB?
You say you installed it "embedded". Is this the same as "frugal"?

regards
Magnus

Posted by pr0f3550r on June 16 2006,15:29

The embedded install is possibly the best solution as it gives the best of both worlds, though I am not sure it is always capable of booting from usb natively.
If you buy a larger memory stick ( ihave just seen a 16GB for Ł125) you can and you should partition it.

Posted by meo on June 16 2006,19:15

Hello again Jagan (or is it Magnus; sounds swedish)!

If you want to use dsl as embedded the first thing to do is to download the dsl-something-embedded.zip. After that I usually unzip the file to a directory and copy the content to the usb pendrive (preformatted to FAT32). My computer ( a 5+ years old laptop) can't boot directly from an usb-drive so I use a cd to start with a cheatcode something like: dsl fromhd=/dev/sda1 qemu frugal (and it's possible to add others to; I use noswap also so I can spin down the harddrive and get a quiet environment) and after that it boots up normally. If you use dsl-embedded you'll get a directory called qemu containing among other files a 60 MB virtual harddrive (called harddisk) that mounts as hdb when booting. Well that 's just about it I think.

Have fun,
meo

Posted by cbagger01 on June 17 2006,16:57

You can also do a native USB install to a FAT32 partition, but you need to manually format the stick as a FAT32 partition and copy the files from the livecd (make sure that KNOPPIX and KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX are UPPERCASE letters). Then download a copy of syslinux version 3.11 and use it to make a FAT32 syslinux bootloader for your stick. You can do this either from linux or from MS Windows, just make sure to download the correct OS type from the syslinux site.